Hidden Stems支藏干

Hidden Stems are the heavenly stems thought to be tucked inside each earthly branch. A branch stands for a month and its season. Since a month does not feel the same in its opening days as in its closing ones, two or three stems were placed inside each branch. They are named the residual stem, carried over from the month before; the middle stem, which bridges; and the main stem, which represents the branch. That main stem is held to fill the longest share of the month. The idea is a way to look at an inner layer that the eight visible characters do not reveal.

• 支to prop up; here, branch (Korean reading: ji)
• 藏to hide, to store away (Korean reading: jang)
• 干shield; stands for stem (Korean reading: gan)

Stems kept out of sight inside a branch: characters concealed beneath the visible one.

This service keeps a fixed table of residual, middle, and main stems for all twelve branches. Three branches, the Rat, the Rabbit, and the Rooster, have no middle stem and hold two characters, while the other nine hold three. Your detailed results show every Hidden Stem, but calculation uses the main stem alone. It decides a branch's Ten Gods role and polarity, and the residual and middle stems stay out of both the Ten Gods counts and the element counts.

Look inside the branches when an element seems scarce on the surface and you want to know whether it sits underneath. If an element that no stem shows turns up inside some branch, certain readings say its quality has simply not surfaced rather than being gone. Simpler approaches skip Hidden Stems altogether and work from the eight surface characters. Here, the inner characters appear as separate reference material and are kept out of every count.

Inside 申 (Shen) sit 戊 (Wu), 壬 (Ren), and 庚 (Geng) in residual, middle, and main order, so the representative main stem is 庚. By contrast, 卯 (Mao) has no middle stem and holds just two: 甲 (Jia) as residual and 乙 (Yi) as main.

• A common idea

  Element counts come out right only when Hidden Stems are included.

  How we read it

  Some methods do count them, but how many to add, and at what weight, differs from one approach to another. This service counts elements from the eight surface characters and shows Hidden Stems on their own.

Classical sources differ on how many stems each branch holds and on the middle stem. Some tables give 子 (Zi), 卯 (Mao), and 酉 (You) a single stem, leave 己 (Ji) out of 午 (Wu), or set 壬 (Ren) and 戊 (Wu) differently in 亥 (Hai). Following its engine table, this service lists 午 as 丙 (Bing), 己, and 丁 (Ding); 子 as 壬 and 癸 (Gui); and 亥 as 戊, 甲 (Jia), and 壬.